Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Why Los Angeles Needs A Jazz Film Festival

"Happiness is a nice wet Rico reed."

"I've never done a gig in a hash bar," notes the guitarist, an older Englishman named Jon Dalton. "I spent my teenage years on the festival circuit in tents and vans. I cooked curry in a hubcap one night."

Welcome to a marijuana dispensary with the James Ellroyish name of L.A. Confidential Caregivers.
Located on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, the space played host to a group of jazz artists who met for a couple of years there for informal Sunday-night jam sessions. It's something that used to happen in into the wee hours of the night, every night, all over the L.A. basin. Hungry young players would run it like a circuit. Then the clubs started dying on the vine and the sessions became limited to Sundays. And during the day to boot.Hal Masonberg's sensual, understated documentary Jazz Nights: A Confidential Journey(2016) makes a case for jazz returning to the night. And not just the literal night but the night of alternative spaces and word-of-mouth, of music free from club and record label skulduggery and allowed to breath again. In the Uber and App-driven world, this could be a new trend in urban America: "Weed Dispensary Jazz." It's a strangely apropos setting, hearkening back to jazz's semi-legal origins. As the spirited saxophonist Geoff "Double G" Gallegos, who looks like he should be playing bass for Metallica, offers: "To be a criminal you have to improvise, and there's no better training for crime than jazz."

But herb is beside the point -- not all the cats in this racially and generationally mixed octet even like to get high. Between intimate musical interludes of the group easing into standards like Freddie Hubbard's "Little Sunflower," Toots Theilmanns' "Bluesette" and Harry Warren's "There Will Never Be Another You," they banter about how the dispensary gig freed them from the Sisyphus-like existence of jazz players in LA-LA Land. Before he wandered in the front door, guitarist Emil Porée drove a bus and cab in Pasadena to avoid the traditional studio-session work that his father was famous for. "I wanted to experience the music the way I wanted to: No veil between me and actual art."

Over the last few months, the Beast had had the privilege of being contacted by a few filmmakers about their various jazz-related projects. Beside Jazz Nights, another one that stood out was Turn the Mics On, a 2011 film by L.A. guitarist Matthew Ritvo about the making of his 2009 album with local luminaries Michael Session, Roberto Miguel Miranda, Bobby English, Rahmlee Michael Davis and the late, great Woodrow "Sonship" Theus.

Add to this are three (!!) recent biopics about jazz: Don Cheadle's Miles Ahead, Howard Budreau's Born to Be Blue and Cynthia Mort's Nina. Each has been subject to its own set of criticisms, but honestly the Beast cannot remember a time when filmmakers could even dream of making any jazz-related project that wasn't a documentary (The Case of the Three-Sided Dream), a delivery-system for junkie porn (Low Down) or just plain lazy (Whiplash). This dates back to the mid- to late-1980s, where the documentary form seemed to outpace the fictional. There was the majestic Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser and the bizarre glitterscummy Chet Baker: Let's Get Lost(both released in 1988), and the dutiful but seemingly incomplete The World According to John Coltrane (1990). For the fictional field, things started off hopefully with Bertrand Tavernier's elegiac 'Round Midnight (1986) -- which garnered its star, L.A.'s own Dexter Gordon, an Oscar nomination -- and ended with a resolute thud by Clint Eastwood's Bird(1988), a noble failure that managed to make jazz more boring than Ken Burns' Jazz.

But thanks to IndieGoGo and Kickstarter -- not to mention these go-go days of online D.I.Y. mini-documentaries -- jazz on film is coming back hard. (Cheadle partially used an Indie GoGo campaign to fund Miles Ahead, as did the filmmakers of Fire Music, Jacoand I Love John Coltrane.) In fact, the Beast did a tally of L.A.-related jazz films and came up with about 30. This doesn't include films currently in production: L.A. rebellion filmmaker Barbara McCullough's film on Horace Tapscott; Mitchell Kezin's film on pianist/vocalist Bob Dorough, Tom Paige's The Gathering (which features decade-old footage of this young kid named Kamasi), Paul Sabu Rogers' Jazz in the Rainforest as well as docs on Shelly's Manne-hole and saxophonist Warne Marsh.

In short, we realized: There's enough material here for a L.A.-centric jazz film festival. Don't believe us? Here's a rundown of what could be. (Of course, if there's anything we've missed, please add to our knowledge.) Yes, much of this can be see online or on YouTube, but let's not lose the chance of seeing these images on a BIG screen surrounded by actual breathing human beings.

Denny Tedesco, son of famed session guitarist Tommy Tedesco, filmed this love letter to the jazz musicians who supplied American youth with its necking-and-petting soundtrack.

KEYNOTE SHOWCASE: CHARLES LLOYD

The iconoclastic saxophonist from Memphis is more associated with Big Sur and Santa Barbara,

but he got his start in L.A. in the late '50s and was part of the local scene until he moved north
for his "wilderness years."

Lloyd was also a vital link between the jazz and rock worlds of the '60s. Amazingly, he's had no fewer than SIX films made about him, almost all by his wife Dorothy Darr. (Our blog bud Greg Burk previews a few of them here.) And oh man, if we could get them to show up for a live Q&A with our pal Dr. Jeffrey Winston? Sheeeiiiit...

Eric Sherman's rarely screened doc was filmed during a pertinent time in Lloyd's career when he was at the height of his '60s popularity and about to go into self-imposed seclusion in Big Sur. Features the sublime quartet of Lloyd, Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette and Ron McClure.

About Me

A Wisconsin-born freelance writer now based in the great city of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, his pieces have been included in the anthologies Da Capo Best Music Writing and L.A. Now. He first entered the blogosphere in 2006 with the music site Downbeast, an offshoot of the L.A. indie-jazz label Cryptogramophone. He was also a senior editor of Glue magazine and has written for numerous publications including L.A. Weekly, No Depression, All About Jazz, Variety, Los Angeles magazine, Time Out-New York, Flaunt, Oxford-American, Black Book, New Times, Extraordinary, and more. Currently, he is working on a book for Asahina & Wallace publishers on L.A.'s underground jazz scene.